History may forgive politicians for being mesmerised by the appeal of air power. Ever at the front end of military technology, able to strike with a precision and intensity unrivalled by other forces, aircraft (and lately missiles) have steadily become more and more lethal and accurate.
The impression gained by the public, and too many politicians who should know better, is that air power is capable of destroying any adversary, anywhere, anytime, with near impunity.
Sadly for the politicians and generals, air power can only be employed to attack targets once air superiority is won. Calculating which targets are worth attacking and whether attacking them will make a difference to the political objective sought remains as thorny a problem in the era of smart weapons as it did in the day of the biplane.
The central error of NATO's intervention in Kosovo has been to assume that a series of strikes against Yugoslavia would blast Belgrade into reversing its ethnic cleansing drive in the rebel province. The politicians appear to have ignored the lessons of the Second World War, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Chechnya and elsewhere and not noticed that bombing infrastructure targets, especially far from the front line, does not have an immediate effect on military operations. Sadly, in this instance, there is good reason to believe that it has provoked the Serbs into speeding them up, although NATO says otherwise.
The need for deployment of ground troops to take part in any combined operation with air power seems also to have been completely misunderstood. Even if the air campaign had been as swift and savage as that in Iraq and Kuwait as in 1991, a land campaign would still be as necessary now as it was then. Nobody can reasonably be expected to return home to Kosovo without armed soldiers alongside as protection. And no amount of protective air power will convince the refugees. With last week's first large-scale civilian fatalities resulting from "friendly fire", the refugees may be deeply suspicious of the sound of aircraft coming their way at all.
To believe that 1991 was some kind of turning point in aerial warfare, and that wars can now be won by air power alone, is especially dangerous given the conditions under which NATO's pilots have to operate. While Desert Storm was an anomaly, fought in comparatively flat terrain by massively disproportionate forces, it was, like the Kosovo campaign, frequently hampered by weather. (Even then, ground forces were needed to deploy laser designators to illuminate the targets from the ground for the laser-guided bombs to be effective in poor weather).
Despite these factors, it was not over in days, but several weeks. And it could be fought without much regard for civilian casualties (although the Allies took care to minimise them).
The same circumstances are unlikely to be repeated on future battlefields again. Precision munition and cruise missile attacks are a superb way of striking at point targets. But they are singularly ineffective at swiftly altering the progress of land campaigns where troops are thinly deployed, often among civilians, which the warfighter does not wish to harm.
Air power will always be the politician's favoured option, due to its relative accuracy, stand-off distances and relatively few casualties. The downside is that in populated, built-up, urban areas with high vegetation and mountainous terrain, there can be no hope for air power to succeed on its own. It is becoming clear that for a successful exit strategy to be effected by NATO, ground forces will be needed to finish the war unless a peace accord can be brokered.
The risk that brings is a prolonged, intensive, conflict with the potential of an even greater loss of life which politicians and their publics will need to steel themselves for. Modern democracies are weak when it comes to this and public opinion fickle, and that is NATO's biggest threat. But NATO has no option but to keep its resolve and be prepared to finish the war with all of the necessary means it has to do so if it is to remain a credible alliance and committed to the long term peace and stability of Europe which it was created to defend.
Source: Flight International